Obama nails why the political climate is so polarized in just a few sentences

President
Barack Obama at the first news conference after Donald Trump's
election.Chip Somodevilla/Getty
Images

President Barack Obama gave his thoughts on how social media had
changed the tenor of political debates in a
new profile in The New Yorker's November 28 issue.

In the wake of President-elect Donald Trump's upset win last
Tuesday, Facebook has faced heavy criticism for
allowing fake news stories to propagate on the social network
unchecked.

At the end of the US presidential election, the top fake news
stories actually outperformed legitimate news stories shared by
some of the most popular media companies, BuzzFeed
reported on Thursday.

Of the fake-news controversy, Obama said social media and other
new media sources had created an ecosystem in which "everything
is true and nothing is true."

According to the president, that has made it so that Democrats
and Republicans cannot agree on an established set of facts to
have a policy debate and instead endlessly argue the facts on
which to base a policy.

Obama mentioned climate change as an example:

"'An explanation of climate change from a Nobel Prize-winning
physicist looks exactly the same on your Facebook page as the
denial of climate change by somebody on the Koch brothers'
payroll. And the capacity to disseminate misinformation, wild
conspiracy theories, to paint the opposition in wildly negative
light without any rebuttal — that has accelerated in ways that
much more sharply polarize the electorate and make it very
difficult to have a common conversation.'

"That marked a decisive change from previous political eras, he
maintained. 'Ideally, in a democracy, everybody would agree that
climate change is the consequence of man-made behavior, because
that's what ninety-nine per cent of scientists tell us,' he said.
'And then we would have a debate about how to fix it. That's how,
in the seventies, eighties, and nineties, you had Republicans
supporting the Clean Air Act and you had a market-based fix for
acid rain rather than a command-and-control approach. So you'd
argue about means, but there was a baseline of facts that we
could all work off of. And now we just don't have that.'"